Los Angeles-based content delivery network EdgeCast Networks is looking to expand its sales and engineering teams, and it’s raised a fresh round of $54 million in new financing to help it do so. The funding was led by Performance Equity Management (PEM), with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures and Steamboat Ventures.

EdgeCast has been around since 2006, and has only raised about $20 million in that time from Menlo and Steamboat. According to EdgeCast president James Segil, the company has been profitable for the last four years, and currently has a $100 million run rate. So if that’s the case, why bother raising money now?

“Because chicks dig guys with cash,” Segil told me.

No, seriously.

“There’s a saying that you should raise money when you don’t need it,” he said. And so, with that in mind, the company took on a whole lot of funding as it looks to expand in a number of ways.

First and foremost, it’s looking to hire more salespeople, to get more feet on the street and accelerate its growth. To date, most of its sales operation has been based in its Los Angeles headquarters, but it’s hoping to add more sales offices nationally and internationally. By doing that, it will be able to get in front of more customers and help explain its increasingly differentiated products to them.

Speaking of, it’s also looking to boost engineering and work on new products. Segil said he’s hoping to get more skunkworks projects going to strengthen its product suite. As a CDN, he explained, the company is building both software and network infrastructure. Either one is difficult on its own, but doing both can be a challenge. EdgeCast sees ways that it can better optimize its infrastructure, improve routing, stuff like that. So hey, mo’ engineers is mo’ better.

EdgeCast has more than 6,000 customers today, including some big names like Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Hulu. Of course, many of them use multiple vendors for content delivery — that’s to be expected — but revenue and usage continues to grow as it signs up more customers and gets them delivering more bits via its network.

So why PEM? Well, it’s a fund of funds and already has a stake in EdgeCast through its investment in Menlo. Having that connection and an understanding of the company’s business already was one reason that EdgeCast decided to take investment from the firm, Segil told me.